Luck

Zachary Bridgeport should have long been weary of his luck.  He’d lost his mother at four to an inoperable cancer the doctors had found just weeks too late.  He’d lost his father several years later to what people forgivingly called a broken heart but was, in reality, an aggressive case of alcoholism that the man had been battling with for years before he’d even met his wife.  Zachary’s grandparents, who only took him in with the most painfully obvious reluctance, were too decrepit to properly care for such a young boy so he spent most of his youth malnourished, in clothes that didn’t fit, and starved for attention.

Zachary was bullied all through grade school.  In high school, the teasing abated after he showed a talent for football but his promising career was cut short by concurrent knee and shoulder injuries which continued to cause him pain for many years.  In college, he fell in love with a girl who left him for his roommate.  He was fired from his first job after wrongly getting the blame for something an unscrupulous colleague did in the break room, and his second job ended even more abruptly when the company he was working for went bankrupt.  And so Zachary became one of thousands of unemployed graduates who spent the long daylight hours shuffling between job interviews as increasingly rote answers spilled from their dry mouths. 

Zachary’s only suit was becoming threadbare and he’d read on the internet that presentation was the most important thing in making the good first impression he so desperately needed, so he carefully counted out money he’d set aside to see a doctor or take a girl on a date, ambled down to the local thrift store, and bought what he thought was their very finest suit. 

It was raining when Zachary left the store.  He had forgotten to bring an umbrella.  The suit was soaked through by the time he got home so he hung it out to dry over the back of a chair and forgot about it until some days later when he landed an interview with a big purchasing company. 

Zachary was waiting nervously in a hard-backed chair when he felt something deep in his jacket pocket.  The only other person in the room was the secretary, who had greeted Zachary with a level of disgust carefully calculated to be just shy of blatent rudeness, but she was hunched over her phone and didn’t see him pull out the thick wad of hundred dollar bills.  Zachary’s mouth dropped open; his face flushed and his hands started to shake.  He quickly shoved the money back into his pocket.

Zachary fumbled and stuttered through his strengths and weaknesses, his short term-goals and his five-year plan, his compatibility with the company philosophy and his work ethic, while his fingers danced and darted around that thick wad of cash.  After the interview, he headed straight for the thrift shop.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said to the woman behind the counter.  “Do you have any idea where to find the previous owner of the clothes you sell?”

“Why?  What’ve you found?”

Zachary hesitated.  He trusted most people, but there was something distinctly off putting about the way the woman had leant forward, licked her yellowing teeth, and was breathing stale smoke right into his face.  “Something personal, I guess.”

“What?  A ring?  Some jewellery?”

“Uh- just a letter.”

“Oh.”  The woman leant back and went back to picking her fingernails.  “Nope.  All the clothes are donations or from estates.”

“Thank you,” he said. 

His conscience unburdened, Zachary wandered through the downtown throngs to his favorite coffee shop where the barista greeted him with a big smile. 

“How are your boys?” he asked while she was making his drink.

“They’re doing well at school.  But my god, they run rings around me.  Yesterday Chad broke the neighbors window when he was playing baseball. I just wish they didn’t have so much energy.” 

Zachary knew she also wished she could get more hours at the shop, and that her rent wasn’t so high, and that the father of her children would start to pay child support.  When he was sure she wasn’t looking, he slipped a fistful of bills into her bag. 

His next stop was the local soup kitchen.  He’d always felt bad when he’d walked past and seen the downcast, shuffling scarecrows line up for their meagre scraps of sustenance.  It was mid-afternoon and no one was around to see him put the bills into the donation box by the door.

Zachary spent the afternoon wandering around the city, stuffing money into pockets and drop boxes where he knew it was needed until he had a single hundred dollar bill left.  Then he went home and put it in an envelope, in case he needed to see a doctor or winded up taking a girl out on a date.

You see, Zachary Bridgeport should have long been weary of his luck - but he just wasn’t built that way, which might just be the only luck that really matters.   



850 words